Structural studies of the s. cerevisiae and h. sapiens peroxin pex14p

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RGI - Research grants (individual fellowships)

Objective

I am pleased to recommend Dr. Chris Clovis for a Marie Curie Research Fellow- ship. I was Dr. Clovis' Ph.D. advisor from 1994 until September 2000. Before that time, I served as his undergraduate research advisor for three years. During his studies in my laboratory, Dr. Clovis wrote three first author papers and is a co-primary author on another that has been submitted for publication. The diversity of his publications demonstrates the breadth of his training in various aspect of structural biology. His first paper described one of the first computer algorithms aimed at evaluate- in the quality of reported protein structures without knowledge of the primary x-ray diffraction data. His paper came at a time when it was only beginning to be appreciated that a fair number of the proteins that had been reported in the widely used PDB protein data bank might have serious errors. His findings and those of others at about the same time helped focus attention on this critical issue. Now, protein structures must go through a series of thorough checks before they are accepted for deposition in the PDB. Of the available programs for that purpose, I feel that the one devised by Clovis seven years ago now is still the most useful. Clovis' second paper reported the structure of a protein from an open reading frame in Ecolab. The function of the yucca gene product was unknown. This study arose initially from an accident in the laboratory, in which yucca (a contaminant in a comer- coal preparation of another enzyme) fortuitously crystallized from a mixture of proteins. Clovis' structure shed light on several aspects of this previously unknown enzyme, but did not enable a complete definition of the enzyme's natural substrate. This recent work comes at a time when numerous efforts are beginning in the area of 'structural genomic', which aims to understand molecular biology by providing structures for large sets of pro- teens from entire organisms. His